Choosing the right eCommerce platform for your online business

So finally you have decided to build an eCommerce website! Now comes the most daunting question as to which platform to choose for your site. Building your own online store using eCommerce platform requires evaluating a number of elements. Though the choices are endless; but you need to examine what’s really important. Let’s look at the factors that you must weigh while choosing an eCommerce platform:

• Define your product category: What are you selling? Are you selling digital or physical products? How many products you’re going to sell online? Some platforms are designed to handle only physical products while others can handle both types of product categories. Ecommerce platform such as WooCommerce offers a powerful inventory system to track the stock of your products in real time while with other platform you need to integrate other inventory management system.
• eCommerce platform designs: eCommerce businesses come in all sizes and with all sorts of budgets. Which design to choose will largely depend on what is your budget. Some eCommerce platforms are designed to be extremely simple and easy to use. If you’re selling few products, the ease of use with simple platforms is more important for your online store. You can even customize the design of your eCommerce store to create a great buying experience on every device for your customers. For this, you need to hire custom eCommerce website designer.
• Open Source vs. Hosted Solution: Open source eCommerce platforms such as Magento Community Edition, PrestaShop and osCommerce are standard software packages developed by web developers around the world. With hosted eCommerce platforms such as BigCommerce, Shopify and Magento Go, you can deploy your online store by paying a small monthly fee and don’t have to worry about installation process and other technicalities.
• Future updates: Does the platform you’re selecting provide options for scalability? Does your platform vendor guarantee you future updates for your online store? Shopify is the best platform for those online stores that are looking to scale up quickly. Magento is another great platform that is highly scalable. For online retailer with low budget, Big Cartel solutions will work just fine. If you get bigger, you’ll have to hire eCommerce website designing company to upgrade your online store.
• Platform Integration: When choosing an eCommerce platform for your business you should consider the integration capability of the platform. Shopify platform offers more than 100 different apps that can easily be integrated into your online store. The platform you select should also integrate with other systems such as CMS, existing EPOS and accounting software to facilitate multi omni-channel commerce.There are a lot of options and several different types of eCommerce platforms available for small to large online businesses. The best way to examine which is the right platform for your website is to consider the above mentioned factors and your business requirements. The process of mapping out your eCommerce platform should start with these factors and end with an understanding of your target audience.Which eCommerce platform are you using for your business and why? Share your comments below!

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